Silly Salary Slides would Select Slaves of the Super-Wealthy to Serve

Once again, my liberal friends aren't quite thinking things through. Lately a lot of them, in response to the colossal federal debt in the United States, have on public media like Facebook repeated the following mantra:

Salary of retired US Presidents .............$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate .......................$174,00​0 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House ............$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders ...... $193,400 FOR LIFE
Average Salary of a teacher ................ $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000
I think we found where the cuts should be made! If you agree... RE-POST

...and their friends do immediately repost, without considering the implications.

First, the above salaries represent a vanishingly small percentage of the federal debt. Even if every elected official (not merely the few listed above) worked for free, there would be no effect on the debt.

The real cuts need to be made in the Pentagon military budget, which is gigantic and, moreover, continuing to get padded at an alarming rate. In other words, liberals should focus not on the salaries of elected officials, but on getting those shamefully underpaid soldiers back home, and into good jobs back home.

Reforming a shameful health system - the United States is the only "developed" country without a single-payer universal health-care system - would be a big help toward balancing the federal budget, though not sufficient in itself to finish the job.

Second, liberals need to consider what would happen if the salaries of top officials are cut deeply.

One fact is: To get top talent, you have to pay top dollar. If we want the most qualified people to serve as (for instance) president of the United States, then we, the citizens, need to offer a salary package that will attract those people. Even as it is, a $180,000 annual salary - while it sounds filthily exorbitant to most of us in the middle and lower wage-earning classes - is in fact minuscule in comparison to the millions of dollars earned by the presidents and CEOs of the major companies. Talent is going to go where the money is, and I hope you agree that we want talented people as our elected public servants.

And if you resent (as the above quotation suggests) that former presidents get paid for life, again - that is nothing in comparison to the stunningly lucrative "golden parachutes" and retirement benefits accrued by former big-company presidents and CEOs. Again: if you want talent, you have to offer a package that will attract it.

Another fact is: It is extremely costly to run for president. Yes, technically, you and I and any citizen can do so. But the expenses of campaigning easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. Anyone who has a serious chance of becoming president is either independently extremely wealthy or has sold his or her soul to the presidents anad CEOs of those evil major companies. The lower the salary paid to the president, the more that president, any president, will belong to the monsters that have burdened us lower and middle class members with high taxes, few jobs, and vanishing social and medical security.

The United States should follow the example of other countries and drastically reduce the cost of campaigning. We should pass laws requiring television and radio to provide free publicity to all candidates (remember, we, the people, own the airwaves!, much as the arch-conservative owned-by-the-superwealthy media conglomerates may think otherwise!).

Better yet, media should be required to provide serious space in newspapers, serious amounts of time on radio and television for substantive debates of the real issues, rather than foolish and misleading "Willie Horton" sound bytes. That way, we might find unsuspected talent in, imagine this!, the poor and middle classes, rather than having to accept elected officials who represent the super-wealthy, the very people out to destroy us!

And the people of the United States should not cut, but increase the salary of top elected officials in order to attract independent-thinking and honest talent, not lapdog puppets of the super-wealthy.

Once again, my liberal friends, by not thinking things through, would have us do exactly what the super-wealthy want us to do: go chasing after windmills instead of identifying and correcting the REAL problems that beset the United States and the world.

Liberals are going to LOSE this battle for the future, to LOSE the opportunity to create a world of peace and plenty for all, and rather see a world of suffering and torment for everyone but the super-wealthy -- precisely because they have woefully misidentified objectives. It isn't the debt ceiling. It isn't elected officials. It isn't the salaries they make. It isn't the platitude-pooping popinjays on public airwaves. IT IS THE SUPER-WEALTHY AND THEIR HUGE COMPANIES!

So I'll thank my liberal friends if they think about this call to cut elected officials' salaries as a vaunted way to balance the budget before they copy it and ask me to copy it too.